


#2

by Zormikea



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 15:53:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19176532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zormikea/pseuds/Zormikea
Summary: Somehow, he chooses you.





	#2

Lately, an uneasy chain of thoughts has been visiting you quite frequently.

Sitting on dirty ground that’s partially covered with decaying leaves, leaning back to a large stone and with your chin resting on your open palm, you watch the eternal flame dancing in front of you and question your past. The answer you find in the depths of your tiredness is almost always the same: if someone had told you some few years ago that you’d end up stuck in a never-ending cycle of fear, chase and death, you might’ve considered taking a bladed glove through your chest rather than struggling and getting, well… here.

Hell, you might have even agreed to go through a death worse than that – anything to prevent what you’re experiencing now on nightly basis (and yes, you have taken a bladed glove through your chest a few times already, and no one asked if you approved of that or not).

Worst thing is, no matter what you do, you always end up sitting by this bloody fire. On this very same spot. If you get killed during a trial, the first thing you see when you come to your senses is its forks of flame. If you escape through a hatch, the first thing you hear is its not so soothing crackle. If you escape through the gates, the fog devours you on instant and delivers you right here. If you die _out here_ , you once again spawn next to it.

You, the smart person you are and have always been, with your constant hunger for knowledge and the smallest of cracks you might slip through, with your desperation to go back to your old life where the biggest worries you had were taking your pills on time and scoring that one date, spend what feels like ages on studying all the nooks and crannies of this hell hole. So far no luck – the fog prevents you from sticking your nose into places you’re not supposed to be in, and should you wander off too far from the campfire, one of the monsters lurking out in the woods will eventually find you.

Still, _you keep trying._

The only good thing about this mess (and you realize it’s selfish, but what can you do) is that you’re not alone in your turmoil. There are several people stuck out here with you, and the number is slowly climbing up. These people are all extremely different from each other, come from different times and backgrounds, even countries, and you have your own little community where everyone does what they can do best, at the same time teaching you and each other. Feng Min tells you how to minimize the noise you create while working on generators that power up the exit gates, Laurie shows you how to effectively strike a killer when he’s expecting least, Nea is an expert when it comes to silent evasion and hiding. Then there is Claudette, whom you followed around in trials for quite a while, absorbing all you could about healing plants and how to mend yourself as quickly as possible.

You, of course, not only take, but also offer. It is often difficult with your quiet nature and the general detachment you feel when you communicate with other people, but you try. No one can control their dreams as good as you, build dreamscapes as grand and breathtaking as you, and that’s as useful outside of trials as it is in them, since hope is a crucial part of dealing with this madness. For lost souls such as you are, being able to control at least some aspect of their lives is what keeps them going.

You work together like that, as well as you can, and take in newcomers when those arrive.

With new people, however, come new monsters. It’s an established balance that, as far as you’re informed, hasn’t ever been broken – and that’s why, as soon as a fresh face shows up at the campfire, you know you will meet another enemy soon. Everyone stops what they’re doing to regard the newcomer, and the silence would be deafening if not the rustle of burning wood coming apart at your feet.

***

The new trial starts with snow. It’s actually _snowing_ , and you’re so not used to seeing it all around you that you spend a few precious moments on rubbing the tip of your boot against its fluffy texture.

It’s not freezing out here, but you wrap your jacket tighter around you anyway, and wander off to find a generator to work on. You hate this repetitive part, mostly because your fingers always get burnt in the process of repairing, and sometimes when you fail at connecting the right cords the entire thing may blow up in your face. Your injuries never get out of these trials with you, but you can still feel the burn while you’re here… not to mention the noise can attract the killer, and then if they find you, burnt fingers will become the least of your worries. It’s nothing compared to being hooked alive or outright murdered.

Noise is what catches _your_ attention when you’re rounding a corner of a half-destroyed building, and you feel slightly relieved because someone is already working there, and that means you don’t have to do it alone.

“Hey,” Claudette smiles at you when she sees you taking a shortcut through the window, and you nod at her before getting to work. She’s just started, and you have a lot to do here, so you sit on the opposite side of her and watch her back while she watches yours.

With time, you’ve become good at guessing the killer by the sounds they cause or their personal belongings scattered across the area. Children’s voices sing their merry song wherever Freddy goes, a ghostly bell rings when the Wraith slips in or out of invisibility, a couple of killers have traps you sometimes step into, and so on. This time it’s none of that. You think it might be the Shape, the only killer you never know is coming for you until you actually see him, but you keep in mind that the new killer might also have this kind of advantage. Claudette nods at you, and it’s clear to you that she’s thinking the same.

Strangely enough, you power up the exit gates without any loss. You didn’t see any single sacrifice performed, and by this point it’s pretty evident that you’re going against the new killer. Myers would not let four people escape in any kind of environment, and neither would someone else you’ve already met, so this seems to be the only logical option.

As you and Claudette proceed to the closest gate, you suddenly hear Meg cry out in pain, and then the killer finally reveals himself.

You… didn’t expect to see what you see. Usually, it’s pretty easy to spot the killer because their appearance stands out, be they big in size or disfigured, but this is just a normal looking guy with a mask on his face. The mask itself is kind of creepy, has an eternal grin scribbled on it, but you’ve seen the Doctor’s face, and you’ve seen the Hag, so this is not particularly threatening.

Even less threatening are his actions. Even though he manages to stab Meg once, she’s long since used to such situations, and kicks him in the knee, using his temporary weakness to sprint towards the open gate. David runs past him as well, performing the dash trick he’s famous for, and that’s when it dawns upon you that the new killer doesn’t really have much experience in this field. He’s fast, and the knife he’s holding sits tightly in his grip, but he simply hasn’t been hunting actively before this trial. It puzzles you why the Entity would make such a pick at first, but then you remember someone who’s been here for way longer than you saying that it feeds off of strong emotions or something like that, and maybe this is why this new killer is so disoriented. Maybe it’s absorbing his–

Claudette’s scream pierces through the air, and you jump where you sit, pulled out of your thoughts. Apparently, she came to the same conclusion as you, but while you sat there hiding and observing from a safe distance, she decided to try her luck.

You see the killer pull his knife out of her stomach, and your impulsive side rushes to the surface, sending you towards them. You tackle the guy to the ground, and miraculously both you and Claudette make it out alive. You feel more than hear the killer’s outraged shout before the fog envelops you; Claudette sighs with relief as pain leaves her body together with the wound, and the only thing you can think about is how lucky you got this time.

It is a known rule that experience comes with each new trial.

***

Next time you meet this masked killer, he is different. Or, more precisely, she is different – and for a while you try to connect puzzle pieces and understand how this works. You sit a good distance away from the shack where she’s currently trying to get a hold of Dwight, and though the way she moves resembles that guy from before, they don’t seem to be related.

For now you stick to the theory that the Entity pulled in not just one fresh killer, but two.

***

Or maybe three.

***

Four.

***

At this point you’re expecting to meet a fifth one, but the next masked person you come across is that first guy again. You’re back to the Ormond ski resort – or that’s what the sign on the main building reads – and the killer seems to be more aware of his surroundings now, which is not surprising at all since he had plenty of time to come to terms with his new lifestyle, and he was probably surrounded by the rest of the killers and his three masked friends.

You keep hiding behind a broken piece of furniture, watching as he checks the room and eventually walks away and towards the snowy outside, and as soon as you’re sure he’s gone, you get to work. You don’t know which survivors are undergoing this trial along with you, but you sincerely hope they can handle this killer.

About a couple of minutes later Meg’s pained scream alerts you that he’s found at least one survivor. You keep working on the generator you’ve recently found, casting quick glances towards the source of the sound while your warm heart battles against your cold mind. You want to get up, to help Meg escape somehow, but at the same time you know you won’t be able make it, and even if you dashed towards her right now, you’d most likely end up staring at her corpse. The best thing you can do is continue working and hope she gets to stun the killer just how Laurie taught you to…

… but unfortunately, that hope doesn’t last long. The sky above Ormond darkens, and the Entity welcomes the first ascending body into its deadly clutch.

You speed up your actions. That almost results in you hitting the wrong thing and making the entire machine blow up – that’s when another scream rings out and you know for a fact that the masked killer _has_ become better. You bite your lip as your nerves tense, and another sacrifice is made exactly when the generator comes to life. Not so far away the last one starts too, and that’s enough for the gates to power up.

When you get to the closest gate, Claudette is already there at the switch, her breath heavy from the run and her hair wild. She sends a brief smile your way, and you get closer, but then you’re not alone anymore. The killer appears out of nowhere just as the door slides open, and Claudette doesn’t have enough time to avoid the attack.

You act before you think again, your intuition relying on your past experience, but it doesn’t go as planned. Claudette successfully escapes, but only because the killer has suddenly switched to you, grabbing the back of your jacket and yanking you back. He’s much stronger than before, and you realize you’re screwed when you’re lying flat on the ground, and he gets on top of you with his knife ready to strike.

 _He has a tattoo on his neck,_ is somehow the last coherent thought that flies through your brain, and then there’s nothing but pain pain pain as the killer stabs you again and again.

You cry out as the blade invades your flesh, your burnt fingers digging into the man’s worn jeans, and a hand rises to your head and grips your hair tight, forcing you to look up. You don’t know how, but a hint of a proud smirk finds its way to your face even with all the pain you’re going through. You did it, you managed to save Claudette once again.

The killer’s hand halts mid swing.

You don’t remember clearly what happened after that. The last thing you recall is a furious growl, and then you think he dragged you somewhere… but the rest of that encounter is fogged and refuses to come to you.

***

Later, when you’re sitting by the campfire, you reflect. Now that you’re thinking about it, the killer could have easily jumped at Claudette instead of focusing on you – she was the one he wanted to get in the first place, and that would have been easier. He could also have sacrificed you and watched you bleed… but he did nothing like that. He didn’t try to please the Entity, he just roughly stabbed you again and again until you were out.

You frown.

_He made you look at him._

Back when it all happened, you were too preoccupied with writhing in pain underneath the killer, but now this particular detail strikes you as odd. It almost felt personal, like he wanted you to remember who exactly was dragging the living lights out of you.

You don’t want to think about what that might imply, but you do so anyway.

***

“You wanna know somethin’?” Jeff says once, and your ears perk up because it’s the first time you’re hearing the newcomer speak in such a concentrated voice.

The other lost souls gather around the man, and he regards them all before continuing with his speech.

“I was in a trial recently and ran into this masked guy ya’ll have been talking about. I think I know who it might be.”

He had your curiosity, now he has your full attention. You leave your spot by the fire and come closer so that you won’t miss a single thing he says.

“Long before this shit hole took me, I used to work at a video store, and there was this dude who came by every now ‘n then. We weren’t friends or anythin’, but I liked him enough to take him up on his offer that one time. Asked me to paint a mural for him ‘n his gang, so I went to mount Ormond, to that ruined building you’ve been to, and painted the words he asked for on the wall of the second floor.”

“The Legion,” Claudette says, and your eyes jump to her on instant. You’ve been to the building, but you never quite had the need to go to the second floor.

“That’s the name of the gang.” Jeff nods. “Didn’t know the kids had it in them... even though they did behave a bit odd when I was paintin’. The leader’s name – that’s the regular, yeah – was Frank. He’s got that grinnin’ face mask and a tattoo on his throat.”

You attach the name to the first guy. The leader, then. You feel like you should memorize that.

“Then there was… what was her name… Julie. The girl he was always gravitatin’ to. Then the black guy, Joey, and another girl who really stood out because she was too… I dunno, innocent looking? The one whom you’d expect to have best grades in school, chess or paintin’ addiction and so on. That one’s name was Susie.”

“So the Entity brought in four killers,” Dwight sums up, and Jeff nods again, a few times.

“Apparently so.”

“But why an entire gang when it usually needs just one person?” Meg asks, and you can’t help but wonder the same.

No one can answer that question.

***

With time, things become… weird. You don’t notice it at first because you have survival to focus on, unlit generators and evasion and whether or not you found all the totems, but eventually realization catches up to you and hits you in the face.

Your jeans are uncomfortably wet after trotting knee-deep in the swamps, your fingers cut from pulling apart endless blades of tall grass, and you’re crouching among rocks, praying to God the masked woman will not see you going for that hex of hers. Susie is looking the other way, her long, colorful hair rising and falling slightly from the wind, and that’s when it happens.

Suddenly, she turns her head towards you – it doesn’t seem like she’s noticed you yet because she’s not moving, but at the same time you just feel like she’s looking directly at you. Ignited with adrenalin, your memory goes back to that one trial where Joey stood at the open gate, eyes on you as you were vanishing in the fog, then to Julie, who once watched you escape through a hatch and didn’t do a thing to prevent it, and then back, and back, and back-

And that’s how you realize you might be becoming a second Nancy.

You crawl backwards until you can’t see the masked woman anymore; the fact that she doesn’t attempt to sacrifice you isn’t surprising, but it does, however, disturb you.

Later, you sit quietly by the campfire, a bit distanced from everyone else and buried deep in your thoughts. It’s not like you haven’t thought about Nancy before, but previously your attention was driven by yearning and desperate want to go back to her – you remembered her trust, her vigorous eyes, the sweetness of her mouth when you’d kissed her. Now, you recall something entirely different. You recall how tense she became under Freddy’s lusting gaze, how she was always afraid of falling asleep, how she screamed in terror when she was convulsing on the basement bed, resisting Freddy’s assault.

She was Freddy’s favorite, his final dessert after the bloody massacre he’d caused, mercilessly killing your friends one by one. Sure, you were there with her, but Freddy still stressed her priority by throwing you aside like unusable trash to get rid of later. He’d been spying on her. Lurking in her dreams, toying with her. Always watching.

This is how it feels for you right now, and you dread it. You know you ruined a few of the Legion’s kills, and you were the reason Claudette survived her first trial against Frank – his first trial as well – and maybe that’s it, that’s why he’s chosen you.

Your hands come up to wrap around you in a not so comforting hug as you wonder what these people might want from you, what exactly there is you can do that the other survivors cannot. Your brain jumps at an idea that yet again comes from the past, driven by an urge to compare, and your fingers dig into your arms as you unwillingly imagine four people towering above you amidst the trees, where no one can hear you calling out for help.

 _No,_ you think. _No, no, no._ But you can’t stop picturing it, and the image burns itself into your skull, always there from this point and on.

***

When you go against the Legion, you change. You don’t risk as much as you would allow yourself while being hunted by someone else, even Freddy, and you work slower on generators, crouch where you would otherwise run. It’s not even something you can control, your mind and body just jump into this defensive mode on their own whenever you think about being special to the gang.

You fear that to their leader you’re becoming something akin to an obsession, what Laure is to the Shape, what Nancy was to Freddy. You don’t know what he wants from you yet, and you don’t intend to find out – the perspective of being hunted first for the rest of your trials is not anywhere near appealing, and getting molested is a thing you don’t even want to consider.

Unfortunately, you find out soon anyway. A trial sends you to Léry's treatment theater, and that’s where all hell breaks loose.

It starts when Frank spots you working on a generator even though you’re barely visible behind a stretcher, and he immediately abandons David who’s already limping, and sprints towards you at an abnormal speed. You start, something within the generator responds with a blow up to your hands, scorching your fingers and sending jolts of pain up your arms, but you hardly notice. You just run, run as fast as you can, vaulting over obstacles and praying Frank doesn’t catch up to you.

He does. As you’re hurrying to climb over a window, his hand shoots out and grabs you by the collar of your jacket – he throws you on the floor, and you instinctively press your back to the wall, watching him with rising panic in your eyes.

There’s this split second where he merely regards you, and then he launches at you, but by some miracle you manage to grab the blade with your hand before it pierces through your shoulder. The pain you feel is immense, but you don’t let the knife get to you.

You struggle like that for some time. Frank pushes forward, you resist. Then there’s an opening, and you jerk up your foot, hitting him in the stomach with such force it sends him tumbling backwards. Your palm is bleeding now that the blade sliced it on its way in and out, but you don’t waste any time and take off while the killer is struggling to recover his absent breath.

You escape… and yet the relief is short-lived as he finds you hiding in one of the patient rooms. The last generator goes live at this point, powering up the exit gates, but Frank doesn’t give a shit about preventing David’s escape anymore. He drives you into a corner, and you realize he’s mad and exhausted because you can hear how hard he’s breathing under that mask.

Here, you expect him to attack you again, and for a moment it looks like he’s actually going to… but then he roars, thrusts the knife into a hospital bed with a force that moves it a few inches, and starts pacing angrily in front of you.

You’re stunned.

You weren’t expecting that at all.

As Frank paces, he clenches and unclenches his fingers, growls once and again and gestures as if he’s trying to communicate, only his mask is not turned to you at all. It’s as if he’s having an internal battle of sorts, and it’s so intense you would gladly take the opportunity to escape, but there’s no way out of this room except for going directly at him.

You try to think of a way out, something, anything… but then Frank suddenly stops moving, and you freeze together with him.

He turns his mask to face you, and waits.

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…what?” you ask reluctantly when the silence becomes too much, and that sets him back in motion.

Frank ignores the knife he left sticking out of the bed, comes closer until there’s too little space between you, and reaches down, brushing his fingers against your chin with unexpected gentleness. He raises your head up, and as his thumb runs over your lower lip, you begin to suspect…

_What Nancy was to Freddy…?_

Your whole body shudders violently. There’s no way you’ll submit.

The fingers holding your chin lose their softness because Frank also feels it, feels it as much as he sees it on your face, that defiance, that unspoken refusal to cooperate where he wants you to. His broken nails dig painfully into your skin, but he doesn’t do anything yet, simply holds you there and waits.

His patience breaks when you avert your eyes from the mask.

He removes his hand from your face entirely.

He tried to give, but you didn’t take, and that’s why you don’t expect to survive this trial… yet you do survive it, as he takes his knife and leaves you sitting in your dark corner, alone and confused.

***

“You said Frank was a regular,” is the first thing that comes out of your mouth when you sit down next to Jeff by the campfire. The man glances at you in surprise since it’s the first time you approached him with such a topic. “What was he like?”

He takes a moment to reflect. “The guy had some real good taste in music. Movies, too. Always picked somethin’ for that gang of his, I imagine, because his picks were always different in genre ‘n all. Hmm… he was fairly young, too – prob’ly a high schooler, they all were. I guess he thought of them as family because I recall him sayin’ he didn’t like his foster parents.”

“So he’s an orphan?”

“Yeah. I think he mentioned a few foster families. Not the best childhood you can get, but back then he looked like he was satisfied with the way things were goin’. Even came up with a name for his gang, and I thought…” He falls quiet for a moment or two. “Anyway, I guess they followed him here, yeah?”

You nod, and he continues.

“As for his personality, though I can’t imagine why you’d want to know about that… I can say he’s used to gettin’ what he wants. It’s just my observation, but when I was paintin’ that mural, it sure seemed like his friends followed whatever instruction he gave ‘em. Other than that… he was really quiet among people he didn’t know. Like he would lower his voice and all tense up whenever someone came into the store while we were chattin’. When he was surrounded by those he knew, though, he became a whole new person. Man, he didn’t know how to shut up sometimes, I tell ya. Not that it bothered me or anythin’.”

You’re all ears, but after saying that, Jeff frowns and shakes his head.

“Don’t think I can tell you anythin’ else, kid. I didn’t know the guy that well–”

“What did he look like?”

There’s a pause. Jeff gives you a look.

“Why’d you wanna know _that_? Last time I saw his face was ages ago, and he wears a mask now anyway.”

You want to answer that question at first, but then you realize you can’t. You can’t tell Jeff about what happened in the treatment theater. You can’t tell him, or anyone else for that matter, that the leader of the Legion gang is… well, kind of becoming more than just a killer to you. You denied Frank what he wanted, that must have angered and humiliated him to some degree, but instead of killing you he chose to show you mercy, and after what feels like years of endless torture and death, this is a gulp of fresh air.

You wonder how long ago he stopped seeing you as just another target to mindlessly kill or sacrifice, when he started to see you as a person, someone worthy enough to disobey the Entity’s will for.

“You’re right. Doesn’t matter,” you say out loud, getting up from the ground. “Thanks, Jeff. I’m gonna go catch some sleep.”

“Sure. You look like you need it.”

As you wander off, you think back to your first encounter with Frank, that moment when you tackled him to the ground and saved Claudette. Then you recall your second encounter with him where you once again got the girl to safety, and Frank began to stab you, then halted…

You still don’t remember how exactly that assault ended, but you do remember him attacking you by the exit, and you do remember him raging and dragging you somewhere while you were still alive. All of that is vaguely similar to what occurred in the treatment theater, and why would he bother dragging you anywhere if he could just finish you off were you were lying?

You frown, and your pace slows down as another realization comes to you.

***

The next time you meet Frank, you start paying more attention. While getting out alive from all trials continues to be your top priority, you let yourself be a little bit calmer when it comes to him. You keep in mind that he’s still a killer and that means he may change his mind about you whenever he damn pleases, but some part of you somehow knows he won’t. There’s something in you that pulls him in, something that he wants to get, and judging by his letting you go after what you did, you can safely say it’s more than what Freddy wanted from your former almost girlfriend (sure, Frank might want it as well, but he hasn’t attempted to _make_ you do it yet).

As for Frank and his gang, they are getting better and better at hunting with each coming trial. It often happens that you are the only one to survive these encounters, though you don’t feel quite safe when you’re around the other three members of the Legion. They chase you, and while they don’t ever seriously harm you, you sometimes feel like they _want_ to. Frank himself doesn’t bother to do anything to you, but he occasionally watches you from afar when he’s not busy running after someone else and scouts the area.

It’s creepy. At the same time, it’s weirdly soothing.

There’s a time when you find yourself in Ormond, and you head straight to the second floor of that half-destroyed two storey building to look at the mural Jeff was talking about. It’s sitting right there on the wall in daring white letters, the entire thing reminding you of a giant spider web, and you almost reach out and touch the _L_ with your fingers when a faint sound from below distracts you.

You crouch behind a pile of old cartons just in time to see the gang leader appear on the same floor as you: he stops by the mural and stares at it, his posture relaxed, and for a second there is that urge within you to come up to him and try talking.

You resist.

The moment stretches too far, and your inner voice becomes almost impossible to ignore, but then the masked killer turns towards the cartons abruptly as if he’s been aware of you hiding there the entire time. You hold your breath; he even makes a few steps towards you, toying with his knife as he does so, but he never comes too close.

He probably saw you coming here. If so, what is this? A choice?

You don’t move.

A few seconds later a generator comes to life in the distance somewhere, with a loud noise following someone else’s success, and you almost miss the frustrated, borderline irritated sigh that slips through the mask before Frank turns around and walks back downstairs to deal with the progress. Contrary to your expectations, everyone makes it out alive this trial, and perhaps that’s what finally launches the inevitable downfall.

***

You’re dragged into a new trial a couple of hours after you get out of Ormond alive – it’s the same snowy place again, and a masked killer is hunting here, but this time it’s not Frank, it’s Joey. The man spots you so quick you haven’t even made a dozen steps yet, and immediately dashes in your direction with a raised knife.

You’re the target.

The scent of danger is so prominent you take off without a second thought – your legs carry you away from Joey, but he is faster, a lot faster than any member of the Legion has ever been, and he catches up to you effortlessly,  stabbing you in your left shoulder and then throwing himself at your back. You fall to the ground, grunting in pain, and he roughly turns you around, straddling your stomach and raising the knife to stab you again.

You’re scared as hell, you weren’t expecting this, and that’s when you see the same fear residing in his eyes, the only Legion eyes that have ever been visible because he wears a cloth mask. He doesn’t want to do what he’s doing, but he has to, and you shield yourself with your arms because there’s nothing else you can do–

Except Joey suddenly starts yelling as if he himself has been stabbed, and crawls off of you before falling to both his elbows and knees. His chest is heaving, the knife lies forgotten, and an obscure sight reveals itself to your eyes.

As you watch Joey’s form shift into another one, his clothes changing colors and shapes into those you’re more familiar with, you realize with terror that the Entity didn’t take four people to hunt in the trials. It has always been just one being, a shapeshifter, a mix of several human souls.

Frank rolls on his back, clutching at his jacket as if he can’t breathe, and you rush to his side.

“Shhh... It’s okay, you’re okay,” you mumble even though you know it’s not anywhere near okay, but Frank stops thrashing anyway, and turns to look at you. He breathes for a moment, and a quiet, almost soundless whisper makes its way out of his mouth and directly into your heart.

“I…”

He raises a hand to your face, but before he can reach your cheek, his fingers twitch, then once more, and then he’s screaming beneath the widely grinning mask, and you can’t do _anything_ to help. The first time you hear his voice, it’s clear, loud, and drunk with suffering.

It ends abruptly. The fog engulfs you both, shutting down the trial that's barely begun, and no matter how hard you’re clutching into Frank’s body as you’re being pulled apart, you can’t follow where the Entity takes him.

You come to your senses by the campfire, with your heart running miles per second.

***

A long time passes before you meet Frank again. It happens out of the blue, in a place where you expect to see him least.

When you come out of your trial one night, with a cloud of fog supporting you as your feet touch the ground in front of the campfire, you instantly notice something is off: the entire group of survivors appears to be restless, and it doesn’t take a genius to follow their stares and spot a lonely figure sitting afar, barely touched by the light of flames. You haven’t seen this face before, but you would recognize the throat tattoo anywhere, and besides, Frank is still wearing his old clothes, with the hoodie up, even though there’s hardly any blood left on them.

The grinning mask is absent. So is his knife.

Once Frank sees you, he frowns and then pointedly looks away at the trees where the fog marks the border between safety and danger – he doesn’t seem to be very excited about what he thinks is about to come, but you make your way to the former killer anyway. That’s what’s got to be happening, right? A killer that doesn’t kill is no killer at all.

“Hey,” you greet him cautiously.

He looks up at you again, and snorts. “ _Of course_ you wanna talk.”

His voice is cold. Distant. Jeff wasn’t lying, this guy doesn’t like to stay among strangers, and on top of that he’s currently surrounded by people whom he repeatedly killed without hesitation. You keep that in mind as you proceed.

“I wanted to talk a few times before this,” you tell him, but he doesn’t look convinced at all.

“Yeah, man, obviously. Especially after I spared your damn friends that last round, and you fuckin’ bailed on me instead of stayin’.” Frank picks a small pebble, regards it with such disdain as if it insulted his entire precious gang, then throws it at the campfire. “The Entity got mad with me. Put Joey in charge after some serious mind fuckery, and what? Have you seen ‘is face when he pounced on you? He was so damn scared of it happenin’ again.”

You don’t remind him that Joey was wearing his mask at the time and it was impossible for you to see much, simply sit down on the ground next to him, not too close but not too far away either. Frank hardly notices.

“And now I’m stuck out here with you losers,” he goes on, rubbing the back of his neck. “No mask, no knife, no nothin’, and I bet ya’ll gonna do what you can to get me killed first. Man, this sucks.”

He falls silent, and it’s your turn to keep this conversation afloat.

“I won’t,” is what you come up with, and Frank actually laughs at that.

“Yeah, great.” He smiles mockingly at you (your eyes linger on the smile), and adds, “just gotta make sure that doesn’t intrude with your hiding behind boxes, am I right?”

Now he’s making fun of you. It’s sudden, and you feel like a fish that’s out of water because no one has treated you like this for a long time, and while you recover and try to come up with a decent response, the moment is lost. Frank sighs, drops the subject and leans back until he’s lying flat on his back.

As he looks up at the night sky above, you realize that he’s young, way younger than any of the killers you’ve encountered so far – not as young as _you_ were when you had only one killer to worry about, but still too young to be surrendering to an urge to murder.

“How’d you become a killer anyway?” You ask. “Did you kill someone before getting here?”

“And why would I wanna tell you that?” Frank lowers an eyebrow at you, and there’s a faint smirk forming on the corners of his mouth, but his eyes are dead serious. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to talk about it.

“I don’t know,” you shoot back. “But then again, I can’t say why you would want to do a lot of things. Like refusing to kill me. Or trying whatever it is you tried to do to me in that hospital room. I can come up with a couple more things if you want.”

You expect some kind of a rise at this, an opening, but Frank just shrugs you off.

“Whatever.”

He’s difficult to deal with, and it’s not hard to understand why. Still, you can’t stand up and leave, you don’t even want to, and there’s so much you want to ask him. It doesn’t look like he wants you gone either because if he did, you’re pretty sure he’d let you know by now.

So you stay. You try again, a different topic.

“What was it like to share a body with the others?”

Frank’s expression shifts into a thoughtful one, then darkens. He doesn’t come up with a snarky response this time, so you must have guessed correctly, but you’re not expecting to hear anything pleasant about this.

He comes up with a single word at first.

“Bad.”

Then, seemingly unsatisfied with it, he hastily gets back up, huffing in annoyance.

“You know what, scratch that, it fuckin’ sucked. You ever wonder what it feels like to listen to several radio stations at the same time? Well I can tell you all about it, all about failing to hear your own damn thoughts in this goddamn mess–”

He abruptly stops mid-sentence, covers his face with his hands and lets out a shaky breath. You throw a glance at the campfire – there are people looking your way, attracted by the scene, but none of them dares to approach you yet.

Soon, Frank resumes talking, and his voice is so quiet you have to lean closer to him.

“There wasn’t a single minute when I was completely alone,” he says, watching dead leaves crumble under his worn boots. “During trials their voices would dull so that I could hunt, or I would be pulled away and wait, but outside of those we just couldn’t shut each other out. Everyone was constantly shoutin’, pushin’, and we were–”

He presses his lips into a tight line and looks right at you, his eyes bright with anger. You feel a chill going up your spine, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

“We were all…” Frank goes again, but it doesn’t come out. He shakes his head then and moves on, averting his eyes from you. “I tried to follow its orders, see if it would become any easier for us, but hey, turns out sacrificin’ people doesn’t do anythin’ for you unless you enjoy killin’. And _not killin’_ anyone drives the Entity mad. When it’s mad, things get _real bad_ , so there’s nothin’ left but keep goin’. No fuckin’ choice, just like good ol’ times… seriously, fuck this shit.”

“You never killed me, though,” you insert before you’ve even processed the thought, and Frank frowns, lowering his head so that you can’t see his face.

“So what.”

“You protected me.”

“ _So what._ ”

He’s brought up walls, and you lean even closer, your shoulders brushing.

“Why?” You insist, because how can he _not_ tell you what he wants with you after all that’s happened to not just you, but also to him? His whole presence here, by this campfire, is the result of him not fulfilling his role as a killer, and you’re one hundred percent positive it started with you. You’re sure he’s thought about it, has probably been thinking about it for quite a while–

He says, “Because.”

“ _Frank–_ ”

And that’s when he jerks away from you, staring anywhere but not at your face.

“Fuckin’ drop it, man, it’s none of your damn business,” he grunts, and stumbles to his feet.

“How is it not my business,” you throw after him as he wanders off, but naturally he doesn’t respond. “Can you at least tell me where you’re going?”

He doesn’t give an answer to that either, though you have a more or less solid guess. Frank puts his hands into the pockets of his jeans as he stalks into the wilderness where the fog marks the borders of your safe space, and you just know he’ll attempt to reach out to his friends on the other side.

Part of you wants to follow him and warn him that he’ll get himself killed out there, but at the same time you don’t think he’ll listen to anything you’ve got to say.

You also can’t shake off an uneasy feeling that swells uncomfortably in the pit of your stomach, like you’ve said something you should not have. You sigh, unable to pinpoint the source of your worry.

***

“You!”

You halt by the narrow entrance of Gas Heaven and squint your eyes at a stack of discarded car corpuses nearby. A hooded figure that’s peeking out from behind it motions for you to come closer, and you comply without a second thought.

“What is it?” you ask when you approach, but instead of answering, Frank points over his shoulder where an untouched generator is sitting amidst some thoroughly abused grass. He flashes you a mildly irritated look.

“What do you think? I have no idea how this damn thing works.”

“A-ah.”

You didn’t mean to look smug, but apparently that’s how Frank reads your expression because he huffs and turns his back to you, crouching back to where the grass is flattened most.

“Get lost,” he grunts without sparing another glance at you, but you’re not that easy to get rid of. Besides, he read you wrong.

“No, wait,” you say. “Sorry, I’ll help. This thing gets nasty if you do it blindly. You press the wrong button, it blows up.”

“No shit,” Frank mutters, glaring daggers at the small opening of the silent machine, trying to guess where to put his hands. “Lost count of how many times that led me to you little fuckers. Now get your sorry ass here and help me out.”

Unsurprisingly, he is bad at repairing generators. Even with you guiding him, he barely avoids blowing this one up on a few occasions, but that’s okay, that’s where all of you started. You’re patient, and whoever is currently hunting takes their sweet time to find you, so you teach him as thoroughly as you can. Sometimes, when you stick your hand into the generator to show what exactly Frank needs to tweak, your fingers brush, and he tenses a little beside you.

“So I have a question,” you eventually say.

Frank gives you a look that clearly states _‘don’t you start with your questions again’_ , but you go on with it anyway. It’s not like you _want_ to talk about it, no, you’d much rather this topic never surfaced again, but there’s this part of you that just won’t calm down until you know.

“Back in that hospital room, what did you want from me?”

“For fuck’s sake–”

“I thought maybe you wanted to force yourself on me,” you interrupt him before he can finish with his outburst. Frank’s fingers curl around one of the cool generator panels, and he grits his teeth, but he doesn’t speak up. “But now I don’t know if I was correct. You’re different.”

“’f course I am,” he says.

“What does that mean?”

You watch him closely. This time it doesn’t seem like he’s about to bite, quite the contrary, he looks so, so very tired. One of his dirty hands comes up to his face, and he rubs the bridge of his nose.

“Why can’t you just drop it,” he sighs, and you’re right, there’s no sign of fight in his voice. “It happened, sure, you saw it the way you saw it. Point is, it’s not happenin’ anymore, it’s all in the past.”

“Is it though?” you ask, and the way Frank’s expression hardens at this shows that you hit a little too close to home.

“It is. Now work on this goddamn generator.”

“You’re not making it any easier for us,” you point out, and he barks a short laugh.

“There’s no us, dude, what the hell.”

You don’t talk much after that. From time to time you hear enraged chainsaw sounds roaming in the distance, but they don’t make it close to you.

This trial, you both escape.

***

You can’t help but notice how no one really tries to befriend Frank no matter how much time has passed since his appearance by the campfire. Jeff talks to him from time to time, and so does Claudette and a few others, but each time you spot them interacting, it doesn’t last long. Frank never sits close to anyone else, not even you (you do that for him when you feel like having another pointless conversation that ends with him leaving), and he stalks off into the wilderness more than anyone would ever want to.

You know he’s trying to find the rest of his gang, but as far as you’re concerned, he hasn’t been able to reach any of them – not here, not during his trials.

Apart from that, you’ve learned that he’s a pretty skilled survivor, which might not be that good of a thing. You hear from the others sometimes that he’s not the best technician, but when it comes to evasion, he’s a pro, too fast and agile for killers to keep up with. That, and he doesn’t give a damn about saving the others even if he risks absolutely nothing.

 _‘Still a killer at heart,’_ you heard someone say, and you don’t know why but that made you feel sad. You remembered how he refused to kill you and got severely punished for that, and it made you sad. You realized his defensive behavior had to come from _somewhere_ , and it made you sad.

Sitting by the fire, watching him leave towards the fog borderline once again, you feel sad because you want to know him better, but he doesn’t let you.

***

The change you’ve been hoping to see comes so out of nowhere it knocks you off your feet.

You find yourself back in Ormond and gravitate to the main building without even thinking about it – there’s always a generator there anyway, right next to a lit fire that can warm you up, so it’s not like you’ll be wasting your time. Apparently, Frank got the same idea because you spot him there with his back turned to the fire as he’s working – he stiffens when you enter and immediately turns to look at you, then visibly relaxes.

“Hey,” you greet him.

“Yeah.”

He motions for you to join him, and you comply.

It’s the second time you’re undergoing a trial together. Frank is more confident about handling generators at this point, but he seems nervous for some reason and keeps eyeing all the entrances to the room you’re currently in. You’re about to make a comment on that when he hushes you; his hands freeze in the middle of fixing, and yours follow their example.

“What is it?” you whisper in confusion, but he doesn’t look at you.

“Listen,” he breathes out instead.

You strain your ears. It’s not very easy to distinguish sounds with the generator coming to life in front of you, but you manage to catch muffled noises of a chase outside. You nod to Frank, but he’s too focused on that to notice.

“Get this generator done, will you,” he asks, slowly rising to his feet. “I wanna check who it is.”

He gets halfway to the window when a piercing scream rings through the air, stopping both of you dead on your tracks. You don’t need to look to know what’s just happened: when a sacrifice is made, the Entity makes sure everyone is aware of that no matter where they are. The first survivor is gone too soon, and you don’t like it one bit.

Frank gets to the window and peeks out cautiously – that’s when things spiral down with the speed of a crashing plane.

“FUCK!” he yells, darting away from the opening, and the next second the wires you’ve connected incorrectly send the generator into burning frenzy, but you miss it completely. A masked killer climbs through that very same window with such speed he might as well have teleported.

It’s Joey again, and he’s drenched in blood from head to toe.

You only notice that Frank has positioned himself between you two when the killer dashes forward and hits him in the chest with an elbow – Frank loses his breath, and he coughs violently as Joey raises the knife at him, ready to strike. You recognize feral frenzy in Joey’s eyes, and your legs just dart towards them without consulting you first.

You don’t want Frank to get hurt. That earns you a stab to your stomach.

“NO! JOEY, WHAT THE FUCK-”

You hear Frank cry out in fury as he jumps at his friend in an attempt to knock him out, but Joey’s confusion doesn’t last long. There’s nothing left of their friendship, the remains have been efficiently wiped out by the Entity’s will, and so Joey attacks back with ferocity of a mindless killer. In this fight, luck is not on Frank’s side, and the last thing you see as you bleed out on the floor is how Joey carries his struggling friend to the nearest hook.

This trial, no one escapes.

***

You find Frank sitting farther away from the campfire this time. It’s so dark you can barely make out the shape of his face.

He doesn’t say anything when you approach and sit next to him, and you don’t say anything either because you’re as shaken after what happened as he is. For a while, both of you watch the rest of the survivors chatting by the campfire, the other two victims of the trial recovering among them. Then, suddenly, Frank speaks.

“You were right.”

The change of mood is almost palpable. You don’t feel any anger being directed at you anymore, there’s nothing but frustration, overwhelming tiredness and cold acceptance. Unlike before, Frank sounds _broken_.

“Listen–” you begin, but he cuts you off.

“No, _you_ listen,” he says. “You wanted me to talk, so here’s me talkin’. Don’t screw it up.”

You frown and nod faintly at him. “Okay.”

Once Frank gets you to comply, he tugs at the edge of his hood so that it covers more of his face even though it’s not necessary, your eyes haven’t adapted to the dark yet. His voice is steady when he continues talking.

“To answer your question from before – yes, I killed someone outside. I didn’t mean to, it just happened. Like sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you need to act fast, so I acted. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, especially sittin' here among ya’ll.”

You nod again, showing that you’re listening closely. You already have questions, and it takes a lot from you to hold them back.

“Now that I think about it, I had it comin’,” Frank goes on. “Jeff probably told you I’ve gone through a bunch of foster homes, but I didn’t tell him the whole story. Punishments for shit I didn’t do, gettin’ beat up nearly every day, no love and no understandin' from those who were supposed to take care of me– fuck, I don’t get it why some people would even want to adopt kids if they’re like this. The last dude was the best, I guess, he was simply never present, preferred drinkin’ in local bars to spendin’ time with me.”

“It was that bad…” you mumble absently, and he chuckles.

“Oh, it was a lot worse than that, dude, though that’s not really important now, is it. Sure, I tried to deal with my situation best I could, yet no matter how I tried, nobody ever listened to me in the end. They just kept sendin’ me to new families like I was a fuckin’ object worth of nothin’… So essentially, when I grew up and realized I couldn’t get people to understand me with words, I started to use my fists. What else was there for me to do?”

 _To endure until you grew up,_ you want to say, but you’re not sure that would be fair. You haven’t been neglected as a kid, not to mention abused, and you can only imagine how such treatment can affect a little boy’s mind.

Frank pulls you out of your thoughts when he resumes talking.

“I tried to work when I ditched school. Eventually met my friends, someone who was actually willin' to listen to me. That’s how the Legion came to be.”

There, he takes a pause. Your eyes have gotten used to the dark somewhat, and from what you can see, he’s reluctant to move on with this part of the story. He does anyway.

“That doesn’t mean I was happy with the rest of the world. No one else cared about me, so it was only natural I didn’t care about them either. They bit me, I bit back. They hit me, I hit back. When they fired me, I decided to rob the place in return. That’s where we got our first kill, the guy jumped at Julie out of nowhere, and I reacted. Made everyone else join, too. We got rid of the corpse, and the next thing I knew, we were all here, stuck in the same body.”

“So that’s how it happened,” you mutter. Frank looks at you with an expression you can’t quite name. It looks like amusement, but there’s something else lurking underneath.

“You’re blamin’ me.”

“I’m not–”

“Disappointed, then,” he cuts you off. “You think I can’t recognize it when I hear it? I’ve been through this shit so many times it’s useless to try and cover it up, man.”

When you don’t answer, he hums, turns away from you and resumes watching the campfire. “’s alright. Told you, I had it comin’. That’s what all bad guys like me deserve in the end, ain’t it?”

“No.”

This time, you recognize the emotion. Frank is completely taken aback by your answer.

“Why?” He asks, and you find it very easy to explain.

“There are killers who deserve the worst,” you say, looking him straight in the eye. “Cruel killers, who mercilessly ended numerous lives and didn’t bother to look back or regret. And then there’s you, there’s Wraith, there’s Leatherface and a few others, those of you who do deserve punishment, but certainly not this.”

“Huh.”

“And from all of them, you’re the only one who went out of your way to save me. I don’t know what it is that you liked about me so much, but you protected me where you could. I can appreciate that.”

For a moment, Frank is out of words. He opens his mouth to say something to you, but nothing comes out, so he closes it. It’s almost comical how quickly he turns away from you again, and yet you’re having none of this behavior now that you feel like you’ve broken through his thick shell at last.

If you’d happened to cross paths with him before you got into this mess, you would have judged him differently. Now, however, you’re so used to being tortured and killed, so used to being hated, that this spark of solicitude lights your entire being.

You move closer to him, close enough that your sides touch, and although Frank flinches initially at the contact, he doesn’t take long to adapt. His hand comes up and around your shoulder, pressing you to his warmth, and you let your eyes rest _._

“I envy you,” you hear him whisper into the night air as he’s holding you. “When you first got in my way, and after that, when you looked at me with such defiance even though I was literally in the middle of killin’ you, I realized how strong you were. You _hit_ me, so I wanted to crush that strength of yours, but no matter how hard I tried to hurt you, to show you that I was stronger, you never gave up. So I looked at you. _I looked at you_ , and then I realized I was lookin' at the person I’d failed to become.”

“You were a kid,” you remind him, and he laughs quietly and grimly.

“Does it matter? I’m broken. I’ve been broken for god knows how long, and I wanted to break you as well, even more so in that hospital room. It’s all thanks to your resistance back then that I managed to stop myself and think, ‘what the hell am I even after? Why not help him instead? What will happen if I don’t follow orders anymore?’ And now I’m here. I’m miserable, there’s no bright future for me, I’m worried sick about my friends, but… I feel like a decent human being again. It’s fucked up, I know, but–”

“It’s okay,” you say. It’s not okay, and you both know that. You also know that things could definitely be worse. “We’ll figure something out.”

He presses his forehead to your temple and pulls you closer.

***

Contrary to what you were hoping for, things don’t become much better. You and Frank talk a lot more often now, and the air around you is friendly enough for others to sometimes stare at you in confusion, but other than that nothing really changes in a good way. You’re still stuck in here, Frank hasn’t talked to any of his friends yet, and even though he made it clear that he feels better on this side with you, it is not hard to see how badly he’s suffering.

It’s most apparent when he gets into trials against the Legion members and fails to get through to them – after those he walks away from the campfire, and it’s difficult to cheer him up.

In the end, a time comes when you realize that there might be a way to, well, fix things somewhat… however, the downside is so heart wrenching it makes you want to stop thinking about it and bury it deep underground where Frank would never find it. You almost go with it, but then one night the fog spits Frank out, and it’s like he’s another person, someone who’s been crushed repeatedly and thrown out to rot. He brings his hand to his chest, and that’s how you know he’s been killed by one of his own. You rush to help him up, and he feels as lifeless as he looks.

That night, you tell him about your plan. As you suspected, Frank gets angrier and angrier with each word you say, and almost literally blows up as soon as you’re done talking.

“Are you fuckin’ insane?” he yells at you, pacing back and forth, and you’re grateful to yourself for leading him as far away from the others as it was possible. “After everythin’ I told you, after all that I– seriously? You _seriously_ want me to do that?!”

“It’s nothing you haven’t done before,” you say. You’re sick of what you’re suggesting too, but you’re sicker of seeing him like this. As much as you want to keep things as they are, you know you’re not moving anywhere. “At this rate, your friends will turn into mindless puppets, and you know it. They’re scared of the Entity, but you aren’t. You can pretend to be. We can work together.”

Because if you can’t find an exit on your side, and Frank couldn’t find one on his, maybe there’s something in between, and you need to push from both sides to discover it. Maybe he can talk to Wraith, or Spirit, or Hag, or literally anyone who’s sick of being stuck here, and then you can work together towards a common goal. Maybe all it takes is for the pawns to riot.

“Fuckin’ shit… I can’t believe this …” Frank presses his back to a tree and slides down with his hands covering his face. His shoulders are shaking.

“I’m not very excited either,” you say, approaching him and sitting down in front of him. You place a hand on his knee, and he drops his to his sides, glancing at where you touch and then at you.

“You changed me.” He argues. “I want to protect you. You symbolize what I’ve always unconsciously yearned to be... And now what, you want me to murder you with my bare hands?”

“The Entity doesn’t allow weapons–”

“That’s not the point!”

You know it’s not, and you squeeze his knee apologetically.

“Frank, this is more than just you and me. It’s about everyone. It’s about the possibility of getting out of this circle, of saving your friends. There’s no better way for you to redeem yourself than go through with this.”

“I know… Shit, I know!” He breathes in and out in nervous gasps, then places his hand on top of yours and squeezes back. “But I don’t wanna strangle you. I don’t–”

“It’s the least painful way I can think of,” you insist. It’s not an easy thing to do when you don’t want it either. “And we’ll do it in a trial. If the entity made you one of us survivors when you refused to kill me, it should return you to the killers’ side if you do it.”

“And what if it doesn’t. What if it decides it doesn’t want me anymore.”

It’s a good question, but you’ve thought about this before. The Entity feeds off of strong emotions, doesn’t matter which ones, and Frank was, is, and will continue to be one of the best sources. That’s why, you think, it refused to get rid of him when he failed to be a killer in the first place. That’s why it should bring him back to that side if he starts murdering people again.

You tell him that, and that seems to be convincing enough, but he doesn’t agree yet.

“If we do that… I’m gonna miss you so bad,” he admits, intertwining his fingers with yours. “I’ll have to kill you more than once, I…”

“It’s okay,” you promise. “Frank, it’s okay as long as you remember who you want to be. You can’t kill me for good too, don’t you ever forget that.”

And that does it. Frank looks utterly destroyed, but he gets what you’re talking about. He gets that he has to step out of this fake, weak comfort zone and work with you so that someday you can create a real one, a place where he will be able to redeem himself and walk together with you till the end.

You appreciate it.

In fact, you appreciate it so much you just crawl closer to him and lean into his space until your breaths mix together, and then there’s nothing between you at all.

He takes everything you give to him.

***

You come back to Ormond. You made an offering.

When you and Frank meet up, he silently takes your hand and leads you away from unlit generators and towards a secluded corner where no one will interrupt you two.

It’s the last time you see him unmasked, and you burn his face into your memory.

***

From now on, you almost never survive trials against the Legion. You run, and you fight back, but they keep overwhelming you in the end, and you find yourself either hooked and sacrificed, or simply killed. You’re but another survivor for them to take care of, and everyone knows it, everyone including the Entity itself. Except…

Except when Frank presses himself to you as he’s stabbing you, and you clutch his bloody jacket, you can hear him whispering into your ear. When he hooks you, he doesn’t leave until you’re dead, and even then he communicates with you. With each passing trial he gives you updates, and it seems that you weren’t wrong when you suggested this.

It’s painful. It’s sick.

Still, you’re moving forward, and he’s right by your side.


End file.
